Women could save America from Trump and a descent into fascism

Michelle Goldberg finds a cure for despair amid ‘Russian roulette’ odds of Republican victory in US midterms

Last week, a friend texted me, “I feel a panic that won’t stop.” I didn’t have to ask what she meant; we are, after all, less than three weeks from the midterm elections. “#Metoo,” I replied.

Many women I know — though, of course, not only women — are walking around with a churning knot of terror in their stomachs. The confirmation of cruel former frat boy Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court brought back the anguish and degradation so many of us felt after the 2016 election. Donald Trump grows more thuggish and mendacious by the day; “gaslighting”, a term taken from a play about an abusive husband trying to drive his wife insane, has become a byword of our national life.

Republicans are increasingly explicit about campaigning to preserve male power. Criticising the #Metoo movement early this month, Trump said it’s “a very scary time for young men in America”. Republican Representative Andy Barr of Kentucky ran a commercial attacking his opponent, former Marine fighter pilot Amy Mcgrath, for describing herself as a feminist. The Washington Post wrote about how an “outbreak of male resentment” is poised to play a “defining role” in the midterms.

Chances are that running as the party of aggrieved men won’t work for Republicans — the statistics website Fivethirtyeight gives Democrats aroughly five-in-six chance of at least taking the House of Representatives. But those are Russian roulette odds. It is unlikely that Republicans will keep total control of Congress, allowing an increasingly authoritarian Trump to consolidate his power. It is very far from impossible, though.

There is, I find, only one thing that soothes my galloping anxiety, and that is talking to women who are actually doing the work of campaigning. The people who are knocking on doors and organising rallies tend to be much more cheerful and confident than those who spend too much time on Twitter obsessing over each new poll.

“One of the things I was a little worried about was maybe enthusiasm would wane, maybe people would get numb,” Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan’s Democratic nominee for governor, told me of the huge outpouring of women’s activism that followed Trump’s election. “I haven’t seen that at all. For 22 months, it’s been solid or growing.”

The Michigan governor’s race, which Whitmer is heavily favored to win, is obviously about much more than gender. One of the things Whitmer is best known for is her promise to “fix the damn roads”, and she’s made the water crisis in Flint a centrepiece of her campaign. Still, if you want to see how the gender chasm has become a defining feature of our politics, and how women incensed by Trump might transform America on 6 November, Michigan is a good place to look.

This year, Democrats in Michigan — which Trump won — are running women for every statewide office: governor, senator, attorney general and secretary of state. A poll last month shows that Michigan women favour Democrats by over 20 percentage points. Campaigning for the Democratic nomination for attorney general, Dana Nessel ran an ad asking, “Who can you trust most not to show you their penis in a professional setting?”

Whitmer doesn’t lean in to gender to quite this degree. But she first came to national prominence in 2013 when, as the state Senate minority leader, she gave a wrench-